April 28, 2006

A new study shows that cells from people over the age of 80 tend to have specific problems with the nucleus. The elderly nucleus loses its pert, rounded shape and becomes warped and wrinkled.

The National Cancer Institute team suggests that healthy cells always make a trace amount of an aberrant form of lamin A protein, but that young cells can sense and eliminate it. Elderly cells, it seems,… read more

October 30, 2009

Researchers at Georgia Tech have made dye-sensitized solar cells with a much higher effective surface area by wrapping the cells around optical fibers.

These fiber solar cells are six times more efficient than a zinc oxide solar cell with the same surface area, and if they can be built using cheap polymer fibers, they shouldn’t be significantly more expensive to make.

December 14, 2004

Data has been sent across a wide-area optical network at 101Gbit/sec., the fastest-ever sustained data transmission speed, equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the content of the Library of
Congress in 15 minutes.

It was demonstrated by a High Energy Physics research team that included the California Institute of Technology, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratories (FNAL).… read more

July 18, 2013

University of Washington engineers are trying to figure out why. They found in a recent study, funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, that one of the reasons face- and eye-recognition systems haven’t taken off is because the user’s experience often isn’t factored into… read more

July 7, 2010

Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and colleagues are conducting innovative research to determine how humans decide to trust strangers — and if those decisions are accurate.

The researchers are examining whether nonverbal cues and gestures could affect our trustworthiness judgments. “People tend to mimic each other’s body language,” said DeSteno, “which might help them develop intuitions about what other people are feeling — intuitions about whether they’ll… read more

The auction’s winner also participates in a roundtable discussion with Knome’s geneticists, clinicians and bioinformaticians to review the winner’s sequence data, and a private dinner with George Church, co-Founder and Knome’s chief scientific advisor.

July 30, 2007

On Wednesday at TransVision 2007, Marvin Minsky puckishly suggested we could solve any population problem by uploading the minds of 10 billion people and running them on a computer that occupies a few cubic meters and costs only a few hundred dollars to run.

Ray Kurzweil claimed that longevity trends are accelerating so fast that the life expectancy will increase more than one year for each year… read more

May 23, 2014

In a paper in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biotechnology, Cor van der Weele of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and coauthor Johannes Tramper describe a potential meat manufacturing process, starting with a vial of cells taken from a cell bank and ending with a pressed cake of minced meat.

Cor van der Weele point out that the rising demand for meat around the world is… read more

February 24, 2004

“If we ever get to the point where script kiddies can release dangerous gray goo, we’re probably doomed –since it’ll surely be harder to stop goo than to stop slow-moving, slow-thinking meat robots from pushing the wrong buttons, says Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Director of Research Chris Phoenix.

“But we will have much more severe dangers to deal with before that point. Like nano-arms races with weapons much more… read more

May 24, 2005

A new study by Stephen Hsu and Roman Buniy of the University of Oregon says the idea of building a traversable wormhole may be fundamentally unstable.

However, they also assert that “semi-classical” wormholes — in which the space-time “tube” shows only weak deviations from the laws of classical physics — are the most desirable type for time travel because they potentially allow travellers to predict where and when they… read more

Using precisely-targeted lasers, researchers manipulate neurons in worms' brains and take control of their behavior

September 25, 2012

In the quest to understand how the brain turns sensory input into behavior, scientists have crossed a major threshold.

Using precisely-targeted lasers, Harvard researchers have taken over an animal’s brain, instructing miniature nematode worms Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) to turn in any direction they choose by manipulating neurons in the worms’ “brain.”

They even implanted false sensory information, fooling the animal into thinking food was nearby.… read more